I am a Junior Faculty Fellow at the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics. I received my Ph.D. from Bowling Green State University in 2012 and have since taught at Virginia Tech and UNC Chapel Hill.

About My Work
Many of us think—or at least hope—that it matters whether we live our lives one way versus another. The central aim of my research is to understand what the world must be like for there to be truth of this kind, and for us to think and know about it. Much of this work focuses on drawing out the implications of core metaethical intuitions concerning things like supervenience, normative authority, and normative objectivity. Other projects—many collaborative—include work on moral responsibility (some experimental) and on the nature of private property.

Publications

"On Leaving Room for Doubt: Using Frege-Geach to Illuminate Expressivism's Problem with Objectivity," Oxford Studies in Metaethics, pending final review.

Broadly and somewhat roughly speaking, metanormative theorists who maintain that there is
normative truth fall into one of three camps: non-naturalist, naturalist and expressivist. I am interested in the prospects for normative truth, and thus in which, if any, of these positions offers hope for the discovery of such truth. In each of three chapters, I address one of these views. I conclude that our best hope is a version of naturalism. However, I reject the label “naturalism” in favor of one that I believe better accords with (what I argue to be) the semantic (as opposed to metaphysical) nature of the most prominent arguments in the relevant debate.

In Fall 2012, I created this flowchart for a metaethics graduate seminar I was teaching at Virginia Tech. I posted it and got some helpful feedback from the folks over at PEA Soup. Some people have told me they find it useful, so I'm leaving a copy here.

A blog dedicated to philosophy, ethics and academia. It was founded by Dan Boisvert, Joshua Glasgow, Douglas Portmore and David Shoemaker in 2004 and is currently edited by David Shoemaker and David Sobel. I have been a contributor since May 2012.